Category: Reviews

Dominion:
The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals and the Call to Mercy
by Matthew Scully
St. Martin’s Press (175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010), 2002.
464 pages. $27.95 hardcover.

In November of 1998 I received a copy of
an article from the National Review. As editor
of Humane Religion, a bi-monthly journal, I was
used to getting all kinds of clippings from our
readers, negative and positive. And when I saw
this was taken from the very conservative
National Review, I was sure it was going to be
disheartening, at best. But I couldn’t maintain
that attitude. The article began with the
statement “Respect for God’s creatures should be
a conservative impulse.”

As a southerner now living in the West, I am intrigued by
the similarities between what is happening today to the Western
cattle culture and what happened more than a century ago to the old
Southern plantation culture.
Both were products of an entrepreneurial spirit that
exploited people and the environment for economic gain. Both
developed romanticized veneers that appealed to Americans trying to
formulate a national identity–but Southern genteel society attempted
to mimic European aristocracy, while the rugged individualism of
pioneering Westerners symbolized, to some degree, an escape from
Old World trappings.

Defenders of gray whales migrating along the Pacific coast of
Mexico, the U.S., and Canada won two important court decisions
within 18 days as 2002 closed and 2003 began.
First, on December 20, a three-judge panel of the Ninth
U.S. circuit Court of Appeals ruled in San Francisco that Makah
tribal treaty rights granted in 1855 do not supersede the intent of
Congress in enacting the Marine Mammal Protection Act. The verdict
requires the National Marine Fisheries Service to conduct an
extensive environmental impact review before authorizing the Makah to
hunt any more gray whales.

In this novel, Tennessee Walking Horses talk and dream about
their lives. Unfortunately, their lives are filled with horrible
abuse by men who care only about the financial rewards of winning at
competition. The book is rich with history and facts about the world
of Tennessee Walking Horses.

Do not mistake Dog Heroes, by Jen Bidner, for just another
kitchy souvenir of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. No
doubt the prominent role of search-and-rescue and cadaver-sniffing
dogs in the aftermath of September 11 have helped search-dog trainer
Bidner to find a publisher and bookstore shelf space, but there is a
great deal more to Dog Heroes than just the 187 color photos and the
mostly familiar anecdotes about the dogs who worked at all of the
attack locations to help find and identify victims.

On July 28, 2002, Colombian ornithologists Jorge Velasquez
and Alonso Quevado photographed 14 examples of Fuertes’s parrot among
tall trees in an alpine forest near the summit of a volcano in the
northern Andes. The brightly colored indigo-and-yellow parrot was
previously documented only in 1911, when specimens were among the
5,355 birds of 513 species and subspecies whom Melbourne A. Carriker
Jr. shotgunned out of the foliage of that region and into the
scientific literature.

It would be hard to find a more mainstream group of shelter
directors than the Food for Thought Advisory Committee assembled by
Animal Place founder Kim Sturla.
Among the 10 panelists are former Humane Society of the U.S.
companion animal program director Ken White, at least three longtime
members of the HSUS shelter accreditation team, and New England
Federation of Humane Societies past president Bert Troughton.

The Parrot’s Lament and Other True Tales of Animal Intrigue,
Intelligence, and Ingenuity may sound noncontroversial, but as
author Eugene Linden points out, the issue of animal consciousness
is “contentious,” meaning it cannot be argued without reference to
ideology.

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